If you are thinking about selling crafts online, you must have a plan for getting traffic to your site.

The biggest mistake people make when planning to sell crafts online lies in failing to develop a realistic plan to market their craft business website. Too often, people invest huge amounts of time and money in creating a gorgeous site, but fail to determine exactly how they will get customers to visit their site. It really doesn't matter how creative, artistic and impressive-looking your craft business website is if no one is visiting your site.

Like any facet of business, selling crafts online will require some promotional efforts in order to build success. Luckily, there are several easy and free or inexpensive ways to promote your online craft business.

You can promote your online craft business by:

1. Getting related but non-competing sites to link to your site.
While you may get some direct traffic from these links (commonly called backlinks), the main value of these links lies in their impact on search engines. Getting good rankings at the major search engines are the key to plenty of free traffic on your craft business site. Search engines see backlinks as a "vote" for the quality of your site, so these links help your site to rank higher with the search engines.

2. Submit articles to popular sites
This strategy is just one way to get backlinks to your site. Website owners are always looking for good content, and many sites accept articles from guest authors. Some sites specialize in providing these types of articles for other website owners to use. Normally the "payment" you receive for allowing another website owner to publish your article is a link back to your site. These links can be very valuable both for the direct traffic they generate and for their ability to help your craft business site to rank higher with search engines.

3. Writing plenty of great content
The more great content you write and post on your site, the more search engines will see your site as an authority on your topic. That results in good rankings with the major search engines.

In order to rank well with search engines, they must not view the articles on your site as duplicate content (i.e. it must not exist on some other website. For that reason, ensure that the content you write on your own site is different from the content you allow others to post in exchange for backlinks.

4. Try social networking
Social networking sites such as Flickr, Squidoo and Twitter can provide good opportunities for you to keep in touch with your customers, for new customers to find you and to obtain backlinks to your main site.

5. Use good keywords

Include in your meta tags and in the information you include on your site, plenty of keywords that people would normally use if they were searching for a site like yours on one of the major search engines. You don't have to guess at these keywords; there are actually several good tools, Wordtracker is one, that allow you to find out what keywords people are using in your particular niche.

With the right tools in place, selling crafts online can be a very cost effective strategy for building and promoting your home craft business. With the right tools, it is absolutely possible to build and market a craft business site that gets plenty of free traffic on a daily basis.

Lisa McGrimmon publishes inspiri-art-and-craft.com, an in-depth guide for building your [http://www.inspiri-art-and-craft.com]craft business Please visit Inspiri for more tips on how to [http://www.inspiri-art-and-craft.com/sell-crafts-online.html]sell crafts online

1 comment:

Great article Rachel, you have hit the nail on the head. Many crafters miss these important parts of business when they are trying to set up their own websites. Advertising on craft malls like HandmadeCatalog.com is great but should be only a part of the overall marketing plan.